[ On Monday, October 29, 2001 at 14:26:35 (-0500), David Maxwell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Embedded NetBSD?
>
> (Especially if someone has offered to pay them for the pragmatic ones.)
Just because someone's paid to make something that would never in a
million years ever be considered by any sane person to be pragmatic to
now appear to be pragmatic doesn't necessarily make it so, especially
not in the eyes of all those who have not been similarly paid, and
especially not when we know that those who have been paid could actually
be doing far more productive and pragmatic things with their time,
wether they are paid to do so or not.
This is one of those very interesting little political quandries one can
get into when those who hold many of the keys to the official repository
of an otherwise public non-profit volunteer project are paid under other
auspices to do things which are not always clearly in the best interests
of the project as a whole.
If Wasabi Systems is being paid to create a version of the NetBSD source
that is suitable to use on a non-NetBSD development platform then
perhaps they should do so in a private repository such that their
unnecessary changes don't otherwise pollute and corrupt the official
public release. Yes those are strong words for this particular
mostly innocuous transgression of the source. I am but one "user" of
the NetBSD source and I represent only a very small number end users of
my own "release" of NetBSD. However there is an important principle
underlying this issue. Just as many of the changes I introduce into my
own release of NetBSD may not be suitable for the official public
release by The NetBSD Foundation, so may be the changes other such users
might make to their own releases of NetBSD. The only huge difference
here is that at least some of those others have commit access to the
official repository whereas I do not, so any changes I propose must
explicitly be approved by another authorised committer while those made
first-hand by already authorised committers may not receive the same
level and degree of review.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>